Better Software East 2017 - Product Owners & Mangers

Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization, and it doesn’t get the support you thought it would. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. Or, you have a great idea but can’t get the resources required for successful implementation. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit of techniques to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work within your organization. This toolkit includes five rules for organizational change management, a checklist to help you determine the type of change process needed in your organization, techniques for...

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training—revolves around agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized, or, in the worst cases, vilified. Bob Galen contends that there is a central and important role for managers and effective leadership within agile environments. In this tutorial, explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders—those who understand servant leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the team’s performance, accountability, and engagement....

Tim Lister, along with five of his partners at the Atlantic Systems Guild, have compiled project patterns from their combined 150 years of consulting, and have described them in their Jolt Award winning book, Adrenalin Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior. We all talk about best practices but only a tiny minority of organizations actually practice them all. Not to worry, think of “best practices” for human health. We know all about them, but very few of us actually practice them all. Maybe if someone did arduously practice all health practices, they...

Aggressive timelines, scope creep, changing requirements, development delays, and the imperative to finish on the imposed timeline … how can you keep your team motivated and engaged when everything seems to go wrong? Larissa Rosochansky describes the major factors of team dissatisfaction, shares techniques to uncover hidden issues, identifies the most common traps project managers fall into, and offers general tips to avoid them. Now that you understand what could be impacting your team’s performance, Larissa guides you on how to minimize the dissatisfaction and keep the team...

Dozens of books address the mechanics and theory behind Scrum. And they’re great. But they offer little guidance to those who work on Scrum teams and are neck-deep in organizational dysfunction—and have no idea what to do next. This is when a team is most vulnerable and likely to slip back into old practices—including bad Scrum. Ryan Ripley helps break this cycle by taking you through the common anti-patterns that emerge when theoretical Scrum is implemented in complex organizations. Ryan explores why these anti-patterns emerge, and what we can do to “inspect and adapt” our way back to a...

Are you having a difficult time finding female engineers to join your teams? Are you currently working on a project which seems to be going nowhere? Have you ever engaged in what you thought was customer-driven work only to later discover it was stakeholder-driven? When it comes to designing products or software that people use, or when trying to uncover precisely what’s wrong with our workplace, studying the decisions we make is critical. Surprise! Many of our decisions are not made consciously. Examining five common unconscious biases seen in development, Catherine Louis helps us...

Do your product teams frequently struggle to have groomed and well-defined stories ready for the developers? Do you find yourselves frequently in “feed the beast” mode to keep your development teams busy? Do your product teams have problems gaining shared understanding across product management, interaction designers, developers, and QA? If so, your product teams manifest the symptoms of single-track agile—and this session is for you. Sean McKeever explains the key steps in establishing dual-track agile methodologies at your organization, presents his experiences, and provides...

Wondering what NoEstimates means in practice, or why you would want to move toward NoEstimates? Perhaps you’ve heard the buzz or read Vasco Duarte’s book. Maybe you simply want to understand how you can spend less time estimating and more time delivering working software—all while providing your customers with some understanding of predictability. If so, Matthew Phillip will help you understand through lessons learned with NoEstimates what and to what degree different factors influence delivery time. Join Matthew to learn how to move from upfront intuition-based estimates to create a data-...

Logan Daigle says DevOps has brought about unprecedented changes in the way organizations solve problems and break down silos. DevOps is empowering employees to automate expensive processes and leverage the power of cross-functional teams to benefit development and operations culture. DevOps is helping bridge a culture gap and focuses on providing shorter feedback loops with more responsiveness to failure. But are we missing something here? Do we really know how much all of these process and automation improvements cost? Do we really know if we are improving our products, processes...

Scrum is everywhere. More than 90 percent of agile teams use it. But for many organizations wanting to scale agile, one team using Scrum is not enough. Dave West says the Nexus Framework, created by Ken Schwaber, the co-creator of Scrum, provides an exoskeleton for Scrum. Nexus allows multiple teams to work together to produce an integrated increment regularly. It addresses the key challenges of scaling agile development by adding new yet minimal events, artifacts, and roles to the Scrum framework. Dave discusses Nexus, addresses its boundaries, and explains what else is needed for agile...

All too often, the triple constraints—time, cost, and quality—are bandied about as if they are the be-all, end-all. While they are important, leadership—the fourth and larger underpinning constraint—influences the first three. Statistics on project success and failure abound, and these measurements are usually taken against the triple constraints. According to the Project Management Institute, only 53 percent of projects are completed within budget, and only 49 percent are completed on time. If so many projects overrun budget and are late, we can’t really say, “Good, fast, or cheap...

The idea of transformation can be both exciting and frightening. How do we shake off old ways of thinking? What will emerge when the transformation is complete? How will I know the transformation is finished? These are questions and challenges that many product teams face as they make the transformation to agile.

Kevin Stilwell shares his experience and techniques for shaking off old paradigms and practices to break the organizational “muscle memory” that exists in many companies. What emerges will be a high performing product team—and the reward will be well worth the effort.

Love it or hate it, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was found to be the most used framework for enterprise-level agility in Version One’s annual survey. That said, many aspects of SAFe—including effective portfolio management—are difficult for organizations to implement.

Laura Burke Olson shares Big Wall Planning, a technique that Ipreo uses to “seed” their release trains with high-priority, high-value, and balanced portfolio-level epics. Big Wall Planning engages all aspects of company leadership in deciding the product roadmaps. This is a huge challenge in organizations that...